Quotes by Women Authors

I've got this image in my head of how I want my life to look, and I have absolutely no idea how to get there. And I'm so scared that I'll make some wrong decision - just one - and everything will get messed up and go wrong -for good.

Someone did us all a grave injustice by implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

Hope Edelman
Hope Edelman
But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.

Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine - that is, activity - which could solve it, is seen as odious.

In following their line through, and those of Plantagenet and Tudor, there is but little to soothe the mind.

But truth, that dangerous commodity, has a way of sticking...

Margery Sharp
Margery Sharp
The difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.

What the men like best are what there's the least sense in, dresses you can't sit down in, that won't stand a lot of action, that hobble you and truss you up and slow you down and fix it so you can't hardly breathe, till finally you're off in one corner, like a bird in a cage, not cluttering up the busy paths in life that men has got to use. That's the styles they really like!

I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.

The mining industry might make wealth and power for a few men and women, but the many would always be smashed and battered beneath its giant treads...

Katharine Susannah Prichard
Katharine Susannah Prichard
A garden is a human creation. It has to be thought of first, wished into being, planned for like a child.

Amy Stewart (writer)
Amy Stewart (writer)
Like I'm dragging bundles of old clothes? I'm carrying artifacts that breathe fire. I'm talking about a language of smoke. These are three-dimensional creatures that can mate. I'd no more leave them go by the side of the trail than I would my child. I'll carry them until someone amputates my arms.

There has been no lack of courage in Ireland; there never is, but even our courage has a fatal quality.

I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.

Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she'd rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book.

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors... and they gave me to understand that if they had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long ago - whereas I don't believe a garden is ever finished. They have all gone now, thank heaven.

Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim
We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés
María Irene Fornés
She had gradually changed her name. "Jane" was too dull. Last year, she'd added a "y", becoming Jayne, which had more personality.

Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.

And still the aster greets us as we pass With her faint smile, - among the withered grass Beside the way, lingering as loath of heart, Like me, from these sweet solitudes to part.

Sarah Helen Whitman
Sarah Helen Whitman
Privacy is something that we maintain for the good of ourselves and others.

Good-bye is always hello to something else. Good-bye/hello, good-bye/hello, like the sound of a rocking chair.

There is generally no such thing as duty to the people who do it. They simply take life as it comes, meeting, not, shirking its demands, whether pleasant or unpleasant; and that is pretty much all there is of it.

Mary Abigail Dodge
Mary Abigail Dodge